Does RAID0 really increase disk performance? If yes, what is the best stripe size to use?

So, does RAID0 really increase disk performance? Yes, definitely. In our tests RAID0 doubled the average transfer rate of our hard disk drive. How this disk performance increase reflects on overall system performance? It will depend on the kind of application you run: programs that make a lot of disk access will be the ones most benefited, of course. On PCMark05 this increase was between 4.44% and 8.82%, while on SYSmark2004 the best result was on Communication batch, where we saw a 15.25% performance increase. On this same program, Office Productivity performance was increased up to 6.52%, while we saw a performance increase up to 8.52% on 2D Creation batch.

With the price of hard disk drives lowering every day, it makes a lot of sense to assemble a RAID0 system if you are building a high-end machine. If you are willing to pick a large hard disk drive for your system, consider buying two hard disk drives with half the size each - for example, instead of buying one 160 GB hard disk drive, pick two 80 GB hard disk drives. The total capacity will be the same and your PC will be faster. Just don't forget to choose a motherboard with on-board RAID function. Regarding what stripe size you should use, it will depend a lot on the kind of application you use. Since we used different programs to measure the performance of our RAID system - each one using data files with different sizes -, the performance difference between the several stripe sizes we used varied a lot.